Fugitive Slaves and the Legal Regulation of Black Mississippi River Crossing, 1804–1860

Strengthening Slavery’s Border, Undermining Slavery: Fugitive Slaves and the Legal Regulation of Black Mississippi River Crossing, 1804–1860 BY JESSE NASTA 16 | The Confluence | Spring/Summer 2017 In 1873, formerly enslaved St. Louisan James master’s consent, or of the passenger’s free status, P. Thomas applied for a United States passport. persisted until the Civil War.3 After collecting the passport at his attorney’s office, Yet, while the text of the Missouri statute Thomas hurried home “to take a look at it” because remained fairly constant, its meaning changed over he had “never expected to see” his name on such a the six tumultuous decades between the Louisiana document. He marveled that this government-issued Purchase and the Civil War because virtually passport gave him “the right to travel where he everything else in this border region changed. The choose [sic] and under the protection of the American former Northwest Territory, particularly Illinois, flag.” As Thomas recalled in his 1903 autobiography, was by no means an automatic destination for those he spent “most of the night trying to realize the great escaping slavery. For at least four decades after the change that time had wrought.” As a free African Northwest Ordinance of 1787 nominally banned American in 1850s St. Louis, he had been able to slavery from this territory, the enslavement and cross the Mississippi River to Illinois only when trafficking of African Americans persisted there. “known to the officers of the boat” or if “two or three Although some slaves risked escape to Illinois, reliable citizens made the ferry company feel they enslaved African Americans also escaped from this were taking no risk in carrying me into a free state.”1 “free” jurisdiction, at least until the 1830s, as a result. Thomas wrote no more on this subject. To him, and Others avoided Illinois entirely, seeking sanctuary in to many subsequent historians, no further explanation the emerging urban Mississippi and Ohio river ports was needed. St. Louis was in a slave state, Illinois south of the former Northwest Territory. was a free state, and the Mississippi River divided But then, during the 1820s and increasingly them. during the 1830s, the rise of steamboats and St. Yet what Thomas experienced as a heavily Louis’ resulting transformation into a western river policed river border by the eve of the Civil War metropolis, a boom in the city’s free and enslaved had not emerged automatically. Rather, decades of black population, the emergence of the underground confrontation, improvisation, and interplay between railroad in Illinois, and the resulting rise in slave law and the everyday realities of African American escapes to what was gradually becoming seen as free border crossing gradually infused this geographic soil, all converged to change the cultural context border with legal meaning. By crossing the river as within which people interpreted and experienced fugitives from slavery, as self-hired slaves, and as the black-letter laws. While Missouri statute had free black workers of ambiguous legal status, mobile outlawed the transporting of “slaves” across the African Americans sparked the legal conflicts and Mississippi River without a pass since 1804, it legal changes that gradually constructed this border, became increasingly difficult for steamboat owners giving rise to the legal “risk” that steamboat and ferry and crew to differentiate among self-hired slaves, owners and crew assumed when carrying African fugitive slaves, and free African Americans. In Americans like Thomas across the Mississippi River. many cases, all of these groups carried documents The basic consistency in Missouri statute purporting to authorize their mobility, whether has masked the profound changes in how people passes from masters or free papers, some authentic experienced, and in turn shaped, the legal regulation and others forged. Increasingly during the 1830s of black border crossing during the six decades and 1840s, Missouri judges responded by holding between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War.2 steamboat owners and crew strictly liable for slave As early as 1804, one year after the Louisiana escapes, even if they believed the escaped slave was Purchase, the territorial legislature laid down a free when they transported them or if the fugitive central rule: no master of any vessel could transport stowed away. In doing so, Missouri courts shifted the any slave out of the Upper Louisiana Territory, which financial risk posed by slave escapes from masters became the Missouri Territory in 1812, without his or to common carriers, incentivizing steamboat and her master’s permission. Despite periodic revisions, ferry owners and operators to scrutinize all people this prohibition against carrying African Americans of African descent as suspected fugitive slaves across the Mississippi River without proof of a until proven otherwise. Although lawmakers and Top left – Slaves being transported in groups were often chained together, as portrayed here in Henry Bibb’s Narrative, published at mid-century. (Image: Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, New York, 1849) Bottom left – Steamboats transformed St. Louis into a thriving commercial center, with more than 200 steamboats arriving each year. This scene is the site of today’s Gateway Arch. (Image: Library of Congress) Spring/Summer 2017 | The Confluence | 17 William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884) was a former slave and the first African American novelist in the United States. While in St. Louis, Brown’s owners routinely rented him out to steamboat operators. Brown’s first escape attempt, portrayed here in his Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, was not successful, but his second escape in 1834—via steamboat to Cincinnati— was. (Image: Library of Congress) “consent or permission.” More fundamentally, the Amos Stoddard (1762–1813) was military commander text of this law used the terms “servant,” “negro or at St. Louis between the cession of Louisiana to the United mulatto,” and “slave” interchangeably, leaving it up States and early October of 1804, and represented the to those along slavery’s border to define and give United States at the “three flags ceremony” in St. Louis in substance to these categories.4 March 1804. (Image: Thepublici.blogspot.com) The small size of pre-statehood Missouri’s free black population is likely one reason lawmakers judges never managed to stop enslaved people placed little emphasis on distinguishing fugitive from escaping, these legal transformations made slaves from “free negroes and mulattoes,” and the Mississippi River an increasingly sealed and policing them as such. In 1804, Amos Stoddard, scrutinized border between slavery and freedom. governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, estimated that a quarter of St. Louis’ three to four hundred Before, and Beyond, Sectionalism: African Americans were free, totaling only 75 to The Multiple Paths of Fugitive Slaves, 100 persons.5 Yet St. Louis’ free black population 1787–Early 1820s only increased to 196 by 1820, compared to the city’s 1,810 slaves.6 Indeed, how small “the number Although the territorial legislature in what of free blacks and mulattoes was in comparison became Missouri moved to prevent slave escapes to the whole population” particularly struck the immediately after the Louisiana Purchase, the Reverend John Mason Peck when he migrated to St. vagueness of the statute that they passed in 1804 Louis in 1817.7 Throughout Missouri, the free black suggests that lawmakers did not yet consider black population also remained small, even relative to the movement between Missouri and the Northwest still-low white and enslaved populations. In 1810, Territory to pose a legal crisis. Adopted just one Missouri’s free black population reached only 605, year after the Louisiana Purchase, the law forbade compared with 2,875 slaves and 16,303 whites, or masters of any vessel from transporting any “servant three percent of the population.8 During this early whatsoever, or any negro or mulatto, or other slave” period, officials could therefore assume that the vast out of the Upper Louisiana Territory without the majority of African Americans in St. Louis and on the master’s “consent or permission.” Although the Mississippi River were slaves, a situation that would statute reflected lawmakers’ desire for some type change drastically during the 1840s and 1850s, when of regulation for transporting slaves across the St. Louis’s free black population came to outnumber Mississippi River, the text of the law provided only the city’s slaves, making it increasingly difficult for the barest guidelines for making this a reality. The officials to distinguish among the enslaved, the free, statute provided no guidance as to what constituted and fugitive slaves.9 18 | The Confluence | Spring/Summer 2017 The fact that Missouri and the Northwest for fugitives from nearby “slave states.” Missouri Territory initially shared a legal culture of lawmakers could view those across the river as fellow slaveholding and fugitive slave recapture also slaveholders and fugitive slave catchers at least until explains why Missouri territorial lawmakers failed the 1820s, and even through the 1840s in southern to promulgate strict legal regulation of black border Illinois’s most proslavery counties.13 Revealingly, crossing. The territorial statutes of the Indiana in April 1819, four months after Illinois entered the Territory (from which the Illinois Territory divided Union as a nominally free state, a Kaskaskia, Illinois, in 1809) created a presumption of servitude for all newspaper announced a one-hundred-dollar reward African Americans and restrained their mobility. for “apprehending” the advertiser’s 22-year-old The 1803 “Law Concerning Servants” prohibited “negro man” Ezekiel. This young man had been held “any person” to “harbor or entertain” a servant not as a slave by, and escaped from, two consecutive having a certificate of freedom indicating that their masters within Illinois.

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